Your Views: Where will stockpiles of guns for safety end?

Dead men tell no tales. Vigilantes go free because they “stand their ground” even if that ground isn’t theirs. This only works if you have a deadly weapon. If your weapon is fists, you can be shot through the heart and no one pays.

In the old Wild West, enemies were entitled to a fair fight; fair is now out of style. This is where survivalists may be taking us. When cities are too poor to afford police Tasers, radios, guns, pepper spray, billy clubs, computers, fast cars, surveillance equipment and SWAT teams because of unpaid corporate taxes and foreclosed properties, then it’s every man for himself.

Officer Friendly (Andy Griffith) is replaced by Robotrooper, whose main concern seems to be securing the perimeter or arresting peaceful assemblers. Want to practice free speech? Get a permit or pay. First Amendment rights are null and void; the Second Amendment is going gangbusters.

Suicide by cop is accepted. In Madison, all you have to do is get drunk, lose your way home and the police will shoot you dead, unless a vigilante got you first. The U.S. has more people in private prisons than any other country, and most are non-Caucasian.

Is this a new war? People are afraid, and so they stockpile weapons to defend themselves at all costs. If guns made us safer, we’d be the safest nation on Earth. So it escalates. Where will it end?